Mr. Was

Read all of
PETE HAUTMAN'
s books
:

Sweetblood

Godless
National Book Award Winner

No Limit

Hole in the Sky

Invisible

From Simon Pulse

Published by Simon & Schuster

www.SimonSaysTEEN.com

pete Hautman

Simon Pulse

If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

First Paperback edition March 1998

Copyright © 1996 by Pete Murray Hautman

Simon Pulse
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing Division
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Also available in a Simon 8c Schuster Books for Young Readers hardcover edition.
The text of this book was set in 10 point Sabon
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Hautman, Pete, 1952-
Mr. Was : a novel / by Pete Hautman. — 1st. ed.
p.              cm.
Summary: After his dying grandfather tries to strangle him, Jack Lund discovers a door that leads him fifty years into the past and involves him in events that determine his own future.
ISBN-13: 978-0-689-81068-8 ISBN-10: 0-689-81068-7 (hc.)
[1. Time travel—Fiction. 2. Family problems—Fiction.]
I. Title
PZ7.H2887Mr 1996
[Fic]—dc20 96-11822
ISBN-13: 978-0-689-81914-8 (pbk.)
ISBN-10: 0-689-81914-5 (pbk.)
ISBN-13: 978-1-439-11574-9

In the autumn of 1952, my father was walking the beach along Onslow Bay just north of Wilmington, North Carolina, when he saw something floating in the ocean. Bits of flotsam and jetsam often washed up on the beach, most of it of little value or interest, but when my father saw the silver-colored briefcase bobbing in the surf he waded out into the breakers and retrieved it. I remember the day he brought it home. He had never seen an aluminum briefcase before. They are common today, of course, but in 1952, aluminum was rarely used for anything other than aircraft parts.

The briefcase contained four notebooks, which my father, being an inquisitive man, sat down to read. He described the contents of the notebooks as telling a “weird sort of a science fictional story. Something like H. G. Wells, only not nearly so believable.” At the time, I had no interest in a bunch of old notebooks, and I never gave them another thought until my father's death in 1991. While going through his things I came across the briefcase in the attic beneath a pile of Christmas decorations. That night I sat down and read the story of Jack Lund.

In transcribing and organizing the contents of these notebooks, I have taken a few liberties. Some of what follows is purely speculative, including a few passages describing events of which I have no firsthand knowledge. I truly believe, however, that I have captured the essence of Jack Lund's story. Although at first I read the notebooks as a fantasy, my investigations over the past seven years have convinced me that the events described in Jack's notebooks actually occurred.

—P.H.

THE FIRST NOTEBOOK:

This notebook described events occurring early in the subject's life, yet the notebook itself was relatively modern: a cardboard-covered, spiral notebook of the type commonly used by high school and college students in the 1950s. The writing inside was shaky and faint, as if the writer were very old. He used a blue fountain pen.

—P.H.

Andrea Island, Puerto Rico

July 30, 1952

I don't know where to start.

It's not that I don't know what I want to say, but that I don't know what to say first. Andie says I should begin at the beginning, but when was that? Or rather, when will that be? My story is like the surf outside our cottage. Each wave that ends its life on our white sand beach is reborn, again, far out to sea. Is it the same wave? Impossible to say. They are all different; they are all the same.

Andie says to just start telling the story. Andie says it really doesn't matter, as long as it gets told. She says to write until the notebook is full. So I'll begin with the phone call that first brought me to Memory. I was thirteen years old then, but I remember it as if it were yesterday, and that is the way I will tell it.

T
he ringing woke me up.

I turned my head. The alarm clock's glowing red numbers read 11:59. As the phone rang again, the red numbers changed to 12:00. So that is where we will begin, at midnight, February 17, 1993. It was a long time ago but, as you will see, the memories are still bright and clear.

The phone went silent halfway through the third ring, and I could hear my mother's low voice. I expected her to hang up right away, because a call in the middle of the night was almost certain to be a wrong number, but she didn't. I heard my father grumbling about how was a guy s'posed to get a good night's sleep around this dump. After a few moments I heard my mother hang up.

Everything was quiet for a few seconds, then I heard the shuffling, creaking sounds of someone quietly dressing.

Our rented house, a tiny two-story wooden house in the Chicago suburb of Skokie, was so small you always knew what everybody else was doing. I heard my parents' bedroom door open. A bar of light appeared under my door. I heard footsteps on the tiny landing at the top of the stairs. I could tell by the
sound that it was my mother, wearing her regular shoes, not her slippers. My door opened. I saw her framed in front of the brightly lit hallway.

I didn't know what was going on, but I remember getting this feeling in my stomach like something bad had happened. She walked over to my bed and sat down and put a cool hand on my forehead. Mom always woke me up that way, with the hand on the forehead. I loved the way it felt—soft, firm, and comfortably cool.

“Are you awake, Jack?” she asked.

I nodded, staring up at her silhouette, feeling my forehead move against her palm. She knew I was awake, of course, but she always asked.

“Something has happened.” Her voice had a tightness to it, like the sound it had when she was too mad to yell, but this time there was no anger in it. There was something else. “It's your grandfather,” she said. “Your grandpa Skoro.”

I thought I knew then what she was about to tell me, because I knew that her father, my grandfather Skoro, was getting very old, and his heart was going bad. He lived in a town called Memory, way up in Minnesota, and he was rich. I hadn't seen him since I was a baby. My mother said that since my grandma had disappeared he'd turned into sort of a hermit and didn't like visitors, especially kids. I didn't remember him at all. Every few months Mom would drive up to see him. She said it was to make sure he had enough kipper snacks, rye bread, and corned beef hash. And
to give him a chance to yell at her. She would always laugh when she said that.

I had always stayed home with Dad, who also liked to yell at her. While she was gone, Dad and I would eat a lot of pizzas and he would drink a lot of beer. He told me that Skoro didn't care for our sort of company. Once when Dad was in a bad mood from drinking too much he told me, “Your grandfather is a cheap, mean, hard-hearted old miser. Well, he can have his money. I hope he chokes on it.” I always remembered that, because when he said it he threw his beer bottle across the room and broke one of Mom's favorite collector plates. He gave me ten dollars to tell her I'd been the one who broke it, and I did, but I think she knew I was lying.